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A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11 They Don't Want You to Ask

Who Is Osama? Where Did He Come From? How Did He Escape? WhatAbout Those Anthrax Attacks?

The events of September 11, 2001 evoke painful memories, tinged witha powerful nostalgia for the way of life before it happened. Theimmediate tragedy caused a disorientation sufficient to distort thecritical faculties in the direction of retrospectively predictableresponses: bureaucratic adaptation, opportunism, profiteering,kitsch sentiment, and mindless sloganeering.

As 9/11, and the report of the commission charged to investigate it,fade into history like the Warren Commission that preceded it, thequestions, gaps, and anomalies raised by the report have created anentire cottage industry of amateur speculation--as did the omissionsand distortions of the Warren Report four decades ago. How could itnot?

While initially received as definitive by a rapturous officialpress, the 9/11 Report has been overtaken by reality, not onlybecause of unsatisfying content--like all "independent" governmentreports, it is fundamentally an apology and a coverup masqueradingas an expos --but because we now know more: more about the fecklessinvasion of Iraq, more about the occupation of Afghanistan and thepurported hunt for Osama bin Laden, more about the post-9/11stampede to repeal elements of the Bill of Rights, more about therush to create the Department of Homeland Security, an agency to"prevent another 9/11," which, in retrospect, is plainly aboutcronyism, contracts, and Congressional boodle.

Many of the amateur sleuths of the 9/11 mystery have based theirinvestigations on microscopic forensics regarding the publiclyreleased video footage, or speculations into the physics ofimpacting aircraft or collapsing buildings. But staring too closelyat the recorded traces of subatomic phenomena involved in a one-timeevent can deceive us into finding the answer we are looking for, asProfessor Heisenberg once postulated. Over 40 years on, the MagicBullet is still the Magic Bullet: improbable, yes, but not outsidethe realm of the possible.

But there is surprisingly little discussion of the basichigher-order political factors surrounding 9/11, factors that do notrequire knowledge of the melting point of girder steel or theunknowable piloting abilities of the presumed perpetrators. Let usproceed, then, in a spirit of detached scientific inquiry, to askquestions the 9/11 Commission was unprepared to ask.

1. Who is Osama bin Laden, and where did he come from?

On this point, the report retreats into obfuscation. Whileacknowledging that he had something to do with resisting the Sovietoccupation of Afghanistan, the report suggests, without explicitlyso stating, that the links between Osama and the United States werepractically nonexistent. This will not parse: until the presentGlobal War on Terrorism, the CIA's operation against the Red Army inAfghanistan was the biggest and most expensive covert operation inthe agency's history. The 9/11 Report provides no convincingdocumented refutation of Osama's links with the CIA, given that theagency was running a major war in which he was a participant.Similarly, the report's authors did not plumb the informal U.S.government connections with the same Saudi government whose linkswith the bin Laden family could have provided a cut-out for anyCIA-Osama relationship. <1>

2. When were Osama's last non-hostile links with the U.S.government?

Consistent with its view of Osama's relationship with the CIA duringthe anti-Soviet enterprise, the 9/11 Report ignores the possibilitythat he may have had a continuing relationship with the U.S.government, particularly with its intelligence services. The reportbrushes this hypothesis aside with a footnote to the effect thatboth the CIA and purported second-ranking al Qaeda figure Ayman alZawahiri deny a relationship. <2>

One may doubt the veracity of Langley's denials of a relationshipwith Osama bin Laden and his associates, given the lack oftruthfulness of its earlier statement to the Warren Commission aboutnot having had a relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald. Or inalleging that an employee named "Mr. George Bush" whom the agencycited in its reporting of the events of 22 November 1963 was acompletely different person from the George Bush who subsequentlybecame the 41st U.S. president, after serving as Director ofCentral Intelligence.

Likewise, Mr. Zawahiri's assertion of not having received a penny ofCIA funds deserves the searchlight of skeptical scrutiny. What thereport describes as Zawahiri's "memoir" is actually a broadsidepublished in a London-based newspaper in December 2001, i.e., afterthe events of 9/11. It was obviously intended as a call to theMuslim faithful for a holy war against the infidel desecrator of theholy places; would such a person, conscious of the need to gainrecruits in a war of pure faith against the Great Satan, haveconfirmed having been on the payroll of his principal enemy? It isno more likely than for the current President of the United States,in drawing parallels between the war in Iraq and World War II, toadvert to the fact that his grandfather's bank was seized by theU.S. government in 1942 for illicit trading with the Third Reich.

Indeed, U.S. intelligence agencies have had, purely as a functionof their charters, relationships with most of the world'sscoundrels, con-men, and psychopaths of the last 70 years: fromLucky Luciano and the Gambino Mob, to Reinhard Gehlen and TimothyLeary, to the perpetrators of the massacre of 500,000 people inIndonesia in 1965, to the Cuban exiles who blew up an airliner in1976 <3>, to such shady characters as Ahmed Chalabi and his friend"Curveball." Among such a gallery of murderous kooks, bin Laden andhis cohorts do not especially stand out.

More dispositive than these speculations, however, are the very realconnections between Washington and Islamic jihadists in the Balkansthroughout the 1990s. The report hints at this relationship bymentioning the presence of charity fronts of bin Laden's "network"in Zagreb and Sarajevo. In fact, the U.S. government engaged in amassive covert operation to infiltrate Islamic fighters, many ofthem veterans of the Afghan war, into the Balkans for the purpose ofundermining the Milosevic government. The "arms embargo," enforcedby the U.S. military, was a cover for this activity (i.e., usingmilitary force to keep prying eyes from seeing what was going on).

A key Washington fixer for the Muslim government of Bosnia was thelaw firm of Feith and Zell. Yes, Douglas Feith, one of theprincipal conspirators involved in launching the Iraq war under thebanner of opposing Islamic terrorism, was a proponent of introducingIslamic terrorists into South Eastern Europe. Do the"Islamofascists" of pseudo-conservative demonology accordingly seemless like satanic enemies and more like puppets dangling from anunseen hand? Or perhaps the analogy is incorrect: more like aFrankenstein's Monster that has slipped the control of its creator.

3. How did the President of United States React to the August 62001 Presidential Daily Brief?

Although the August 6 PBD had been mentioned in the foreign presssince 2002, it did not come to the attention of official Washingtonuntil then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice impaledherself upon the hook of 9/11 Commission member Richard BenVeniste's artful line of questioning in mid-2004. Blurting out thetitle of the PBD, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," she letthe cat out of the bag--or perhaps not. Having opened Pandora'sBox, the commissioners displayed no troublesome curiosity about itscontents.

What concrete measures did the president take after receivingperhaps the most significant strategic warning that any head ofstate could have hoped to receive about an impending attack on hiscountry? Did he alert the intelligence agencies, law enforcement,the Border patrol, the Federal Aviation Administration, to combthrough their current information and increase their alert rates?Did the threat warning of the PBD (granted that it did not revealthe tail numbers of the aircraft to be hijacked), in combinationwith the numerous threat warnings from other sources <4> elicitfeverish activity to "protect the American people?" Not that we canobserve.

So what was the actual response of the U.S. government? Here the9/11 Report exhibits autism. As nearly as we can determine fromcontemporaneous bulletins, the president massacred whole hecatombsof mesquite bushes and large-mouthed bass, perfected his golf swing,and hosted various captains of industry in the rustic repose ofCrawford, Texas. In other words, he presided over the mostegregious example of Constitutional nonfeasance since theadministration of James Buchanan allowed Southern secessionists totake possession of the arms in several federal arsenals. The 9/11Commission's silence on this point is an abundant demonstration ofits role as an apologist, rather than a dispassionate truth-teller.

The testimony of federal officials about what they did up to andduring the attacks is telling, in so far as the false and misleadingstatements of witnesses provide clues. Ms. Rice, her tremulousvoice betraying nervousness, averred, against the plain evidence ofthe public record and common sense, that a PBD stating that Osamabin Laden was determined to strike within the borders of the UnitedStates was too ambiguous to take any action.

Likewise, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft may have perjuredhimself when he denied under oath that acting FBI Director ThomasPickard came to him on July 5, 2001 with information of terroristplots--information that the Attorney General "did not want to hearabout anymore," as NBC News reported on June 22, 2004. It might beconsidered a matter of Ashcroft's word against Pickering's, exceptfor the fact that Pickering had a corroborating witness.

4. Who wrote the script for the rhetorical response to 9/11?

The smoke was still rising from the rubble of the World Trade Centercomplex and the Pentagon when the unanimous and universal cryerupted in government circles, and was relentlessly amplified by themedia, that this was "war," not a criminal act of terrorism. Howvery convenient that this war, declared against a diffuse andstateless entity, would trigger long-sought legal authorities andconstitutional loopholes which would not apply in the case of acriminal act. <5> Torture, domestic spying, selective suspension ofhabeas corpus, all the unconstitutional monsters whose implicationsare only clear four years after the event, all slipped intoimmediate usage with the rhetorical invocation of war.

This was not merely war, it was unlimited war, both in the sense oftotal war meant by General Ludendorff (civilian rights beingtrivial), and in the sense of lacking a comprehensible time span."A war that will not end in our lifetimes," said Vice PresidentCheney on Meet the Press on the very Sunday following the attacks.How could he be so sure during the fog of uncertainty following thestrike?

If bin Laden and his followers were merely a limited number offanatics living in Afghan caves, as we were assured at the time, whydid the Bush administration relentlessly advance the meme that adecades-long war was inevitable? Could not a concertedintelligence, law-enforcement, and diplomatic campaign, embracingall sovereign countries, have effectively shut down "al Qaeda"within a reasonable period of time--say, within the period it tookto fight World War II between Pearl Harbor and the Japanesesurrender?

Four years on, Vice President Cheney, doing a plausible imitation ofthe radio voice of The Shadow, continues to publicly mutter, inmenacing tones of the lower octaves, that the war on terrorism <6>is a conflict that will last for decades. <7> This at the same timeas the junior partner of the ruling dyarchy, the sitting president,is giving upbeat speeches promising victory in the war on terrorism(i.e., Iraq, the Central Front on the War on Terrorism) against apapier mach backdrop containing the printed slogan "Strategy forVictory."

It is curious that no one--not the watchdogs of the supposedlyadversary media, nor the nominal opposition party in Washington, norotherwise intelligent observers--has remarked on this seemingcontradiction: victory is just around the corner, yet the war willlast for decades. Quite in the manner of the war between Eastasiaand Oceania in 1984.

In earlier times, this contradiction would have seemed newsworthy,if not scandalous. Suppose President Roosevelt had opined at theTeheran Conference that the Axis would be defeated in two years.Then suppose his vice president had at the same time traveled aboutthe United States telling his audiences that the Axis would not bedefeated for decades. An American public not yet conditioned bytelevision would at least have noticed, and demanded someexplanation.

So question number 4 concludes with a question: why does the U.S.government hive so firmly to the notion of a long, drawn-out,indeterminate war, when Occam's Razor would suggest the desirabilityof presenting a clear-cut victory within the span of imagination ofthe average impatient American--a couple of years at most? Or isendless war the point?

5. Why did the mysterious anthrax attacks come and go like awraith?

For those in immediate proximity to the events, the September11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon werefrightening in the extreme, but they had not the slow accumulationof dread that the anthrax scare of October 2001 presented. Far morethan any anomaly concerning 9/11 itself, the anthrax mystery is theundecoded Rosetta Stone of recent years.

The anthrax attacks were the most anomalous terrorist attacks inhistory: clever, successful, unpunished, causing five deaths and abillion dollars' damage. Yet never repeated. This alone makes themremarkable in the annals of criminal activity, but there ismore--the intended victims (at least those with an officialposition) were warned in writing of their peril in sufficient detailthat they could take steps to administer an antidote. Is thischaracteristic of terrorist attacks by "al Qaeda," or by any knownMiddle Eastern terrorist group?

Except for the ambiguous first attack (which killed a NationalEnquirer photo editor), all the deaths resulting from the anthraxplot were incidental--mail handlers and innocent recipients of mailwhich had been contaminated by proximity to the threat letters.Evidently the West Jefferson anthrax strain was more powerful andhad greater accidental effects than the plotters had intended.

But what did the plotters intend, if they did not will the deaths ofthe addressees of their anthrax letters? It was pure coincidence,perhaps, that the anthrax scare was at its height, producingpsychosomatic illness symptoms among members of Congress andstaffers, just as the USA PATRIOT Act was wending its way throughthe legislative process. This measure, which originated among thesame Justice Department lawyers who legally opined that torture waswholesome, was rammed through the Congress after enactment of theauthorization of the use of force in Afghanistan. Why is thissequence significant?

The then-majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Tom Daschle, wrote acurious op-ed in the Washington Post four years after the eventsjust described. <8>. In attempting to refute the administration'sallegation that it had been granted plenary wiretap powers in theAfghanistan authorization, he stated that he and his Senatorialconfreres explicitly rejected an administration proposal toauthorize an effective state of war within the borders of the UnitedStates itself.

Given the administration's repeatedly demonstrated refusal to acceptany limitation on its powers, it is logical that the rebuff on thewar powers authorization was followed by the prompt submittal of theJustice Department's draft of the PATRIOT Act, containing many ofthe domestic authorities the Bush White House had sought in the useof force legislation. How doubly coincidental that two of thelimited number of addressees of the threat letters should have beenthe offices of Daschle himself, and Sen. Patrick Leahy,then-chairman of the committee of jurisdiction over the PATRIOT Act.

Needless to say, the measure was passed by an even more comfortablemargin than that enjoyed by the 1933 Enabling Law in the Reichstag.<9> Notwithstanding buyer's remorse exhibited by many members ofCongress, and current efforts to amend its more onerous provisions,it appears we are saddled with the main burdens of its edicts inperpetuity.

How the government placed this perpetual burden on its citizens isbound up with the mysterious anthrax scare of October 2001, anoutrage that, unlike 9/11, does not even merit an officialexplanation. No one has been charged.

6. Why did Osama bin Laden escape?"Wanted, dead or alive!" "We'll smoke 'em out of their caves!" AllAmericans know the feeling of righteous retribution that attendedthe hunt for Osama bin Laden in the autumn and winter of 2001. Yet,suddenly, it fizzled out and became subsumed in attacking Iraq andits oilfields.

We know the explanation. Somehow, bin Laden escaped in the battleof Tora Bora, because "the back door was open." Only after theinvasion of Iraq, more than a year later, was there generalacknowledgement that resources intended for Afghanistan had beendiverted to the buildup for Iraq. The public was lead to believethat supplemental appropriations for Afghanistan were siphoned intothe Iraq project beginning about mid-2002.

But the strange apathy about Osama's whereabouts began sooner thanthat. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, then-SenateIntelligence Committee Bob Graham states the following:

"I was asked by one of the senior commanders of Central Command togo into his office Tommy Franks. Underlings do not summon senior Senators into theiroffices]. We did, the door was closed, and he turned to me, and hesaid, 'Senator, we have stopped fighting the war on terror inAfghanistan. We are moving military and intelligence personnel andresources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.'This is February of 2002 . 'Senator, what we areengaged in now is a manhunt not a war, and we are not trained toconduct a manhunt.'"

Senator Graham elaborates on this matter in his book, IntelligenceMatters, on page 125:

"At that point, General Franks asked for an additional word with mein his office. When I walked in, he closed the door. Lookingtroubled, he said, 'Senator, we are not engaged in a war inAfghanistan.'

"'Excuse me?" I asked.

"'Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed toprepare for an action in Iraq,' he continued. 'The Predators arebeing relocated. What we are doing is a manhunt. We have wrappedourselves too much in trailing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.We're better at being a meat axe than finding a needle in ahaystack. That's not our mission, and that's not what we aretrained or prepared to do.'"

In the first excerpt, the military officer might be ambivalent aboutthe change in mission, merely saying that the U.S. military issupposedly not trained for conducting manhunts. The second excerptprovides more substance, suggesting that Franks himself agrees thatlooking for Osama bin Laden is a mug's game ("We have wrappedourselves too much in trailing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.")

There we have it: as early as February 2002, the U.S. governmentwas pulling the plug. Or was it even earlier? Gary Berntsen, aformer CIA officer, says in his book Jawbreaker that hisparamilitary team tracked bin Laden to the Tora Bora region late in2001 and could have killed or captured him if his superiors hadagreed to his request for an additional force of about 800 U.S.troops. But the administration was already gearing up for war withIraq and troops were never sent, allowing bin Laden to escape.

Now, Berntsen is a typical Langley boy scout who buys into most ofthe flummery about the war on terrorism; but it is precisely forthat reason that his testimony is worthwhile. Here is noideological critic of the Bush administration and its foreignpolicies--on the contrary, he shares many of its assumptions. Likefellow Agency alumnus Michael Scheuer, he has experienced thecognitive dissonance of dealing with the administration's policiesat first hand, and wishes to report on his findings.

Is it plausible that the United States Military, disposing of 1.4million active duty troops and a million reservists, could not scareup 800 additional troops to capture what was then characterized as afiend in human form? Perhaps the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefsof Staff, General Richard Myers, explained it best in a CNNinterview on 6 April 2002, well after the hunt for bin Laden hadapparently been concluded:

"Well, if you remember, if we go back to the beginning of thissegment, the goal has never been to get bin Laden." <10>

What can one conclude from this series of questions? If the 9/11mystery is like other great, mysterious events--such as the Kennedyassassination--the course is probable. For a year or two, rawemotion over the event forecloses inquiry; for the next severalyears after that, the public's attention wanes, and the desire toforget the painful memory predominates.

In a decade or so, though, some debunker will bring new facts intothe public arena for the edification of those Americans, then inlate middle age, who will view 9/11 as an intellectual puzzle: farfrom the urgent concerns of their daily lives.

Many people may, by that time, accept that the official explanationis bunk, and suspect that the government had once again tricked theAmerican public, those ever-willing foils in the eternalPunch-and-Judy show. But the majority will neither know nor careabout obscure international relationships during a bygone era.

In 1939, the English author Eric Ambler wrote a brilliant andnow-disregarded novel whose theme was that the political eventsculminating in World War II were indistinguishable from the squaliddoings of ordinary criminals. Let us quote from that novel, TheMask of Dimitrios:

"A writer of plays said that there are some situations that onecannot use on the stage; situations in which the audience can feelneither approval, sympathy, nor antipathy; situations out of whichthere is no possible way that is not humiliating or distressing andfrom which there is no truth, however bitter, to be extracted. . ... All I know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchymasquerade as order and enlightenment, these conditions willobtain."

Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defenseanalyst.

<1> Bob Woodward's 1987 book Veil describes the informal connectionsbetween personages in the U.S. government and the Saudi government,including the ubiquitous Prince Bandar. Talks between CIAdirector William Casey and the Prince supposedly resulted in afalse-flag "terrorist" bombing in Beirut to retaliate against thebombing of the Marine barracks there in 1983. Regrettably, the deadwere mainly civilians.

<2> 9/11 Commission Report, 23rd footnote to chapter two, page 467.

<3> This is the case of Cuban "freedom fighter" Luis PosadaCarriles, who is suspected of sending the jet-borne Cuban Olympicfencing team to Valhalla in order to express his opposition to FidelCastro. The incumbent administration, otherwise so steadfastlyopposed to international terrorism, has been resistant toextraditing Mr. Posada --no doubt the administration is casting aneye on Florida's electoral votes.

<4> To include the Phoenix Memo, FBI agent Colleen Rowley's urgentbulletins from Minnesota, tips from foreign intelligence agencies,warnings from the Federal government to its high-ranking governmentplacemen not to fly by commercial airliner, the contemporaneouslynoted presence of art students-cum-Mossad agents within two blocksof 9/11 operative Mohammed Atta, and other indicators.

<5> Long sought by Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, whose formative andtraumatic experiences in the executive branch were shaped by theirrevulsion against attempts by Congress, the federal bench, and theAmerican people, to restrain Richard M. Nixon's assertion that theConstitution does not apply to a sitting president.

<6> The phrase "war on terrorism" is, as many people have commented,a somewhat hazy conception, being a war on a tactic, much as if FDRhad declared war on naval aviation after the attack on Pearl Harbor.Significantly, the popular mind has contracted this phrase into "thewar on terror," an even more illogical coinage. If the U.S.government is truly at war against a mental state that gives rise toill-defined dread, it should disestablish itself forthwith, to thebenefit of our rights, our bank balances, and our physical safety.

<9> The Enabling Law passed the Reichstag by a vote of 444-94,whereas the PATRIOT Act passed the House by a margin of 357-66, andthe Senate by a vote of 98-1. Curiously, the Enabling Law wassupposed to sunset in four years: on April Fool's Day, 1937,precisely paralleling the four-year expiration of many of thePATRIOT Act's provisions. Perhaps the eerie similarity reflects theinfluence of Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt on neoconservativelawyers of the Bush administration like David S. Addington, JohnYoo, and Viet Dinh.

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